Tag Archives: wordpress

Fiverr.com is a freelance website where the jobs, known as ‘Gigs’ cost just $5. It’s amazing the range of jobs that that are available, the main categories are:

Gifts

Graphics & Design

Video & Animation

Online Marketing

Writing & Translation

Advertising

Business

Programming & Tech

Music & Audio

Fun & Bizarre

Lifestyle

Other

My new logo came from Fiverr, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the experience, so I wanted to offer you 5 tips to a great Fiverr experience. After you’ve taken a look around and found a gig that you want to purchase make sure to follow these 5 tips as you check out and work with the seller:

Tip #1 – Check the seller’s stats and Feedback:

A fast way to do this is to check their Fiverr Level:

Level 1 sellers have been active on the site for 30 days and completed at least 10 orders while maintaining excellent ratings and a great track record.

Level 2 sellers have made over 50 orders in the past two months while maintaining excellent ratings and a solid track record.

Top Rated Sellers are manually chosen by Fiverr editors. Promotion is based on criteria including: seniority, volume of sales, extremely high rating, exceptional customer care and community leadership. An example of a Top Rated Seller is below:

Fiverr Seller Stats

- Est. Delivery is an estimate of when you will get the results of the gig, many sellers will offer an expedited version for a little more money

- Fiverr Gig rating is based off of user feedback, most Fiverr sellers are very protective of their user rating so you won’t see a lot that are low. Scrolling down and reading the feedback that led to this score is going to be more telling than the numbers themselves. Be aware that fake positive feedback is always a possibility with any kind of site that uses customer reviews, but you should also be aware that fake negative reviews aren’t unheard of either. I understand Fiverr Customer Service does a good job dealing with these but you can’t catch everything so look out for anything that looks too fishy either way.

- Orders in queue tell you how many people are ahead of you in line, a large number could mean a reduced chance of getting your gig completed early but it’s also a good sign that people like the product.

- You can also click their user name and see when the last time they were on Fiverr was, if it’s been a while you might want to look elsewhere.

Tip #2 – Carefully read the Gig details

I know that you have been thinking to yourself – “I really wish I could find someone to juggle a chainsaw and yell out my slogan”. I think you’re weird, but it turns out Fiverr can help you out, your search is going to turn up Mr. Marcus, but you need to read the Gig title and and description very carefully so you know what you are buying and what is an extra. Also, how would you know how professional the chainsaw juggling it is, if you didn’t read it in the description?!?

Gig Description

Tip #3 – Check the Samples

If you like the sample style, that’s your best indicator that you’ll like the style of your Gig. Getting good at a particular style is one way that these sellers can turn jobs over so quickly and at such a great price. To give you a good example of this, here are the samples from the wonderful artist that did my logo:

Fiverr Samples

If a seller you are interested in doesn’t have samples, then make use of the ‘Contact Seller’ link right under the Buy Now button and ask to see some.

Tip #4 – Put extra effort into answering all the seller’s questions

When you purchase a Gig you are going to need to work with your seller so they know what you want, it’s your job to go over and above in answering any questions they have. Let me repeat this – they are working for $5 (less since Fiverr has to get paid too) and that means you need to give them all the information they ask for and then go a step beyond! Answer every question they ask you in detail, link to things you like, explain why, link to things you don’t like, explain why. I’m not saying write an essay or to micromanage, but if you want someone to do quality work for you for $5 then you have to put some time and effort into it too.

Tip #5 – If it’s not quite right – let the seller know

Sellers do not want that negative feedback and they do want happy return customers so if you didn’t get exactly what you wanted then go back and re-try tip 4 and let the seller know what’s wrong and give them a chance to fix it before you leave any negative feedback.

I hope these tips were helpful, and I’d love you to leave your own in the comments below! If you’ve found this helpful then please sign up for Fiverr though this affiliate link, it will help support the site and everything you buy will still be $5!

Today’s Whimsday post is a celebration! I started this blog on a whim, it seemed a good way to share and learn new things. Last week I reached a minor milestone, my WordPress stats show that I’ve had a quarter of a million page views since I started the Knetwork. To celebrate I’ve changed my theme, something I’ve intended to do for a while now. I hope you enjoy the theme and thanks to everyone that reads this for making running the site such a rewarding endeavor!

I am a big fan of the Disqus commenting system, I’ve found it to be a great addition to my blog as well as a wonderful personal tool to use on other’s blogs. I’ve had few problems and with commenting syncing now in place on the WordPress plug-in, I’ve had very few change requests until now. There has been a dramatic increase in human generated spam over the past week or two and if I was a spammer I would jump on this too, because DISQUS does not use nofollow. It’s not even an option that I can find!

Let me give you an example, here’s a post I did on Disqus SEO that has been targeted for spamming (seems fitting, yes?) The comments were on point enough that I replied before i figured out what was going on. I replied by e-mail and the formatting is still screwed upon line wraps when you do that (My other major gripe with Disqus).

If you take a look at the page source and search for iphone and discount office supplies you’ll see some nice free dofollow links headed off to the spammer’s sites. This makes me unhappy – unhappy customers uninstall. Given the nature of SEO, where an outgoing link from your blog counts as a vote, Disqus should have ZERO dofollow links out of my blog’s comments unless I say otherwise!

If this isn’t corrected shortly then look I’ll be installing this Disqus Hack to handle it, and if it’s not upgraded soon i guess I’ll take a look at intense debate and see if they do a better job.

I was a little hesitant to install the Disqus comment system, but I took the plunge to see how I liked it and I find many of the features so helpful and superior to WordPress‘s native comment system that I’ve decided to make the switch permanent. The Disqus dashboard, the universal login for all other sites using Disqus, and the ability to reply and delete comments by responding to the notification e-mail are all major reasons that I’ve decided to stick with the switch. There were two concerns that I had that almost had me hit the uninstall:

1.SEO- I’m not an expert in SEO but I have explored the basics and have seen the value that comments on a post can add to your search ranking, so I was concerned about losing that traffic source. In looking into the subject this issue was one that many bloggers had expressed and is one that Disqus is taking seriously. For WordPress users, the Disqus plugin uses their API and there doesn’t seem to be a problem. I did a little experiment to make sure that the Disqus comments are being indexed correctly, and while I can’t say they have the same value as a WordPress comments, what I see is good enough for me:

Obviously not heavily searched terms, but it’s what I could quickly pull from my existing comments, I encourage you to try the same thing for yourself. You’ll also note that there is no duplicate content from Disqus showing in the searches.

2. Not Hosting Comments – The problems with not hosting your own comments were made clear this past week as a database error at Disqus made all comments unavailable for a short time. Hopefully this point will be moot in a month or so as Disqus implements the export to WordPress feature that’s in the works. If Disqus goes down, you’ll still have all the data. It will be a huge reduction in risk and should help sway those bloggers who aren’t quite sure about making the change.

I first learned of Triggit due to their selection as a finalist in the 2008 Web 2.0 Launchpad event. I’m really impressed with the service, it’s like Zemanta for advertising! I’ll write more on it later but for know I wanted to announce that I threw together a quick plugin for self-hosted WordPress users who feel more comfortable adding a plugin then editing their theme files. This is also useful if you don’t want to have to re-add the code every time you change your theme.

To use this plugin download and unzip it and place the file into your WordPress plugin folder. Activate the plugin and go to the Settings Triggit screen and add your Triggit User ID.

This plugin requires your theme to have the wp-footer hook, if you it doesn’t seem to work that’s the most likely reason and you’d have to edit your theme’s footer file and add <?php wp_footer(); ?> before the /body tag (or just paste your Triggit code since you’re there anyway). If that wp-footer code is there and it’s still not working then leave me a comment and I’ll try to help.